In the screenshots for the northern hemisphere there is a noticeable misalignment between sea ice and land. I already mentioned a similar problem in the Celestia forum; I currently tend to believe that the BMNG is junk above a certain latitude (approx 80°).

In the screenshots for the northern hemisphere there is a noticeable misalignment between sea ice and land. I already mentioned a similar problem in the Celestia forum; I currently tend to believe that the BMNG is junk above a certain latitude (approx 80°).

In the "olden days" (~ 2007), I have repeatedly communicated with the BMNG lead scientist Dr. Reto Stoeckli and got convinced that the BMNG surface texture was quite OK even for high latitudes, but the sea-ice was seasonally changing and thus often showed signs of apparent misalignment without also using Earth season data (as you do).

Another argument I remember is that there are many deep and narrow fjords to be filled by sea-ice. In case of low-resolution (binning) approaches to "sea-ice" these narrow ice fjords may often stay incorrectly ice-free.

I am currently exprimenting with two different GIMP-based approaches for installing ( and adapting) time-averaged 16k sea-ice data to the 16k BMNG texture of June 2004:

As in my previous screenshots, the sea-ice may be installed as a layer mask. This corresponds to the original method in BMNG if I correctly remember. The sea-ice mask from http://naturalearth.springercarto.com/n ... ce_16k.png of course needs to be slightly rescaled from 16200 x 8100 to 16384 x 8192 size!

The size-corrected 16k sea-ice mask is added as a standard layer on top of the RGB surface texture, and black color-selection is activated, followed by Colors->(black) Color to Alpha. This leaves only the whitish sea-ice, allowing for small color and geometry touch-ups.

Note that I always add the Land / Water mask (aka SpecularTexture) as alpha channel via one of my tools (tx2rgba) and then chop the 16k (RGBA + sea-ice layer) into high-quality DXT5 tiles. Note that for RGBA, the alpha channel (A) compression quality is way better in DXT5 than in DXT3 (yet DXT5 filesize = 2 * DXT3 filesize)!

Since currently I also got plenty of C++ coding to do, this level of sophistication should suffice initially in celestia.Sci. An essential highlight is the very fast performance of this 16k hires configuration.

On the contrary, a public release would cement your lead in this field...

Thanks. Limited alphas are neither my style nor are they required, since celestia.Sci is VERY stable, indeed. A main problem is that I am working alone during the summer and that some features I definitely want to have initially, are simply not yet coded. Anyway I am trying hard to be fast Already now, since I have started a small communication link with people from celestiaproject, my private and public mail activities have substantially increased. Sorry, but my spare time is currently insufficient for this.

a few days ago, a post by JohnVV remindet me that in celestia.Sci Chris Laurel's cmod package urgently required porting to our high building standards along with various code improvements.

This I have done meanwhile:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Using the latest Qt and Qtcreator versions, the entire cmod project now builds throughout in 64bit without a single warning and of course without errors with these tools and settings:

To achieve this result, quite a few reshufflings and additions notably of Qt headers and code were necessary. Now, the performance of the package (cmodview, 3dstocmod, cmodfix, cmodsphere, txt2cmod) is entirely stable and builds with a single click.

Notably the Qt application cmodview offers all options fast and without issues --with one exception:

As also discussed over in the celestiaproject site, the .dxt5nm normalmap format is not properly detected. Normalmaps in png format work nicely and also surface textures on non-spherical cmod bodies can be e.g. in dds or png etc.

after turning phobos around a bit, it really looks like a one-eyed smiling crocodile[by all means click on image]

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Finally, I checked the gaskell cmods that were clevely enhanced by Chris Laurel: On medium-sized non-spherical cmod models (from data), he managed to superimpose hires normalmaps in the dedicated .dxt5nm format. This improves speed a lot, saves lots of polys and allows to load normalmaps of far higher resolution on top of only medium-sized cmod models! However, as ChrisL always emphasized to me: this only works without surface textures. Once I made some further progress about this important issue, I post it here...[by all means click on image]

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eros_gaskell.jpg [ 73.4 KiB | Viewed 913 times ]

and this remarkble Eros rendering also happens to be an excellent approximation of the famous "Curry Wurst" as invented in Hamburg (just to test whether colors work properly in cmodview) [by all means click on image]

Notably the Qt application cmodview offers all options fast and without issues --with one exception:...

there is another: cmodview doesn't convert binary<->ascii like 3dstocmod does. This is an useful option.

Massimo,

sorry if my sentence was somewhat misleading: I did not mean to imply that cmodview now performs all tasks that the entire former cmod package did. I meant that cmodview does properly what it was supposed to to since its existence. The other package members like 3dstocmod, cmodfix etc deal with remaining (conversion) tasks. New code improvements, will come surely once I find some time for this.

Right, John. I actually used cmodfix a lot in my extensive testing of the new 64 bit cmod package. Whenever a binary .cmod model had to be modiified, cmodfix -a ... was used to first convert the binary to the ascii .cmod format. After the changes were done, "cmodfix --normals --binary..." was used again to convert back into a binary .cmod format.

Wow... This is just amazing. I've been waiting for this for quite a few years (since I was a naive high school student). Thank you for all those hard work!Have you considered hosting the project on GitHub or something... Just can't wait to get a glimpse of the code.

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